1986: Michael Horsley; Now: Michael Horsley for The New York Times
The corner of N Street and 15th Street, NW Washington.
One damp morning this winter, Jim Abdo was looking through architectural renderings at his office in Logan Circle, one of the many leafy Washington neighborhoods anchored by a statue of a long-dead guy riding a horse. Abdo got his start as a property developer by buying decrepit buildings and modernizing them, and his headquarters shows off the trick. The adjoining storefronts had been stripped bare and rebuilt, all warm wood and cold glass with exposed brick and beams. It looked like a Brooklyn design studio or a Silicon Valley start-up, or at least how those offices might look in a Nancy Meyers movie. But Abdo has built his business in the unstylish land of think tanks and tepid salmon lunches and boxy women's suits.
1994: Michael Horsley; Now: Michael Horsley for The New York Times
11th Street between F Street and G Street, NW Washington, in 1994 (above) and now.
Abdo, a lithe and neat man with salt-and-pepper hair, was wearing jeans and a trim pullover and excitedly explaining how he was going
to raze the office we were sitting in and replace it with more of his signature "luxury but affordable," as he put it, rental units. He showed me a photograph of our location, a corner with a busy coffee shop with outdoor seating, a high-end rug store and the Abdo Development office. In the next slide, the buildings had been replaced by a handsome new glass-and-brick stack of a building, custom-built for white-collar professionals paying $3,000 in rent, all made possible by their low-level but cushy private-sector jobs. "We're looking for those kids just out of law school who've come to Washington and they're working 14 hours a day, but they want a place that isn't a group house," he said. "It's for people who want to say, 'I've arrived.' "
Eager to show what arriving in Washington looks like these days, Abdo escorted me into his hulking Range Rover with a two-digit license plate — assigned to him by the former mayor Anthony Williams, who is godfather to his son — and we barreled south across the Potomac. The first destination was Gaslight Square, a pair of condo buildings featuring units with double-height living rooms and Wolf ranges, just across the river from the high-end shopping district of Georgetown. (There's room for a third building, which Abdo plans to break ground on soon.) Abdo pushed open the door to a model unit, and we walked in on a sandy-haired 20-something in a fleece jacket signing papers. "I didn't plan that," Abdo said, feigning a red-handed gesture. "We get lots of first-time buyers from Northrop Grumman, CEB" — the massive defense contractor and the corporate advisory firm — "places like that."
Washington wasn't always the place where young professionals plunked down $3,000 a month to announce their arrival. When Abdo founded his business, in 1996, the United States was enjoying around 4 percent economic growth, but in Washington, dysfunction and Mayor Marion Barry Jr. reigned. The city government was locked in a mismanagement-driven fiscal crisis: traffic lights were malfunctioning; garbage trucks stopped picking up trash; District residents were advised to boil their own water; President Clinton and Congress placed the city into federal receivership. During the 1990s, while employment in Washington declined, Northern Virginia added 300,000 jobs, and the Maryland suburbs added about half that. "Washington was a national embarrassment," Abdo said back inside the Range Rover. "There was all this aggressive panhandling, all these vacant burned-out buildings. But I knew the city could only go so low. It's one of the least cyclical economies in the country, and it has this tremendous urban fabric."
Abdo figured that federal employment would remain relatively stable, even in recessions. The continued opening of Metro stations would also allow for transit-driven development. And of course, there was that tremendous urban fabric — the brick row houses that make up the bulk of the housing in the city's center, from Georgetown in the west to Anacostia in the southeast, and give it some of its genteel European feel. Abdo's timing, it turned out, couldn't have been better. Billions in federal spending, largely a result of two foreign wars, were pouring into the local economy by the early 2000s. Then came the housing bubble. But after it burst, a remarkable inversion occurred: as the country withered, Washington bloomed. Since 2007, the regional economy has expanded about three times as much as the overall country's. By some measures, the Washington area has become the richest region in the country. It is now home to the three highest-income counties in the United States, and seven out of the Top 10.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 11, 2013
Photo credits for an earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the photographer who took the pictures. He is Michael Horsley, not Horsely.
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